Quotes from Jacques Pepin

I am a glutton. I'll eat whatever is there. Pizza. I love hot dogs anywhere. I've got nothing against any of that. If I feel like eating, I eat. I don't feel guilty about it at all.

My palate is simpler than it used to be. A young chef adds and adds and adds to the plate. As you get older, you start to take away.

You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.

I tell a student that the most important class you can take is technique. A great chef is first a great technician. 'If you are a jeweler, or a surgeon or a cook, you have to know the trade in your hand. You have to learn the process. You learn it through endless repetition until it belongs to you.

The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.

Just because I am a chef doesn't mean I don't rely on fast recipes. Indeed, we all have moments when, pressed for time, we'll use a can of tuna and a tomato for a first course. It's a question of choosing the right recipes for the rest of the menu.

After 45 years of marriage, when I have an argument with my wife, if we don't agree, we do what she wants. But, when we agree, we do what I want!

I was chef to the French Presidents between '56 and '59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn't even see them.

Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn't have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I'm a pure American - even more than people who are born here - because I did it by choice as an adult.

Cooking is the art of adjustment.

a couple of our buddies from Le Pavilion had opened restaurants in the Catskills around Shan-daken and Hunter Mountain and spoke highly of the area, so Jean-Claude and I, along with a few other friends, rented a place there to use as a weekend retreat.

punctiliousness—in

fromage fort, a concoction put together from various leftover cheeses, which are puréed in a food processor with the addition of garlic and white wine.

L'éxactitude est la politesse des rois" (Punctuality is the good manners of kings). That

fromage fort, a concoction put together from various leftover cheeses, which are puréed in a food processor with the addition of garlic and white wine. This "strong cheese" is excellent spread on bread, toasted under the broiler, and served with a salad.

red beets with shallots,

FROM THE TIME that Claudine was an infant, she saw me butchering deer carcasses, plucking pheasants, skinning frogs, or eviscerating rabbit or squab. She understood and knew naturally that there was nothing cruel or malicious in those processes. They were a normal part of life. In fact, most of the deer meat we enjoyed was road kill that otherwise would have gone to waste; we stewed it in red wine or roasted or grilled it, turning extra meat into sausages.

I WAS BORN on the eighteenth of December, 1935, in the town Bourg-en-Bresse, about thirty miles northeast of Lyon, the second of three sons of Jeanne and Jean-Victor Pépin. Weighing only two and one half pounds, I nearly died at birth. The midwife lined a shoebox with dishtowels and put me inside, placing the makeshift incubator between two bricks that had been warmed on the stove.

In his workshop, he had a can of colle de bois, or wood glue, that he kept hot on a small wood stove. It had an awful smell. He told me it was made from mistletoe berries. I was fascinated by the idea of those little white berries turning into that darkish, thick, sticky, and smelly mixture.

His favorite recipe was perfectly simple. He would cook the whole cap of a cèpe, which sometimes weighed three quarters of a pound, in olive oil with whole garlic cloves in a low oven for forty-five minutes until the moisture evaporated. As the mushroom gently browned, the flavors became concentrated, almost like a piece of meat.

As much as anything, getting an education cured me of my complex about not having an education

I still love canned sardines, served simply on top of salad with finely sliced onion and a sprinkling of red wine vinegar.

The remaining four changed according to market and seasonal considerations, but could include melon slices, radishes, salads of tomatoes or lentils, grated carrots and walnuts, a tangy cucumber and dill salad, or stuffed zucchini.

The large courtyard was shaded by a linden tree, and we gathered and dried its leaves and flowers to make tilleul, an infusion commonly consumed after dinner in those parts of France.